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GCAP 2020 - Sharing more than stories: An introduction to open sourcing parts (or all!) of your game

Publication date: 2020-09-17

Usage: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Topics: software development, game development, gamedev, independent game development, indie gamedev, releasing open source, open source, free software, free and open source software, FOSS, F/LOSS, OSS, GCAP

Presentation description:

Video games aren't just huge business, they're also a wonderful way to share experiences and stories with others. They're rightly recognised as a powerful medium for entertainment and artistic expression. Similarly, open source software has grown from its bold beginnings as a statement for freedom to become a movement of millions of projects that underpin our technology. Nearly 100% of new software projects rely on open source in some way, including most video games.

Despite the prevalance of both games and of open source, there are surprisingly few open source projects out there from game developers, and many of the ones that do exist are a good start but could use some work from an open source perspective. There's a lot of great potential here, as a healthy ecosystem of open sourced gamedev resources could help continue the growth of the game industry as well as support a greater abundance of independent game developers.

In this talk you'll learn not only how to release something correctly as open source, but also why you might want to do so…or perhaps why not. I'll walk you through some of the most common mistakes I've seen in my more than thirty years in the free and open source software world and show you how to avoid them.

We'll cover:

What is open source, really, and why should you care?
Benefits to releasing an open source project
Potential gotchas if you release a project
Types of projects that are great candidates for release as open source
What to do before, during, and after the release to ensure project success

Files:

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